Unworried Drummer

When he gets a chance, a percussionist can be the biggest boom in any symphony orchestra, but most of the time he just sits and counts on his fingers while the rest of the musicians play. To show himself off he can do two things: 1) beat the daylights out of his instruments when he comes to a triple fortissimo, and 2) watch for his chance to perform one of the rare works in the repertory in which the percussion is the whole show.

Stocky, energetic Saul Goodman, 46, timpanist (kettledrummer) and head of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony's percussion section, got a rare chance to do both last week in Manhattan. At the orchestra's first children's concert of the season, he surrounded himself with a dozen instruments of his profession and engaged them in a one-man battle against time in a piece called The Worried Drummer.

For nine minutes Goodman walloped his bass drum and cymbals, zipped out a few flams, drags, rolls and paradiddles on the snare drum, tinkled the xylophone, banged the triangle and tambourine and rattled the castanets, shook a string of sleighbells in his teeth like a dog and wound up lying exhausted across his timpani. The kids enjoyed it as much as Goodman did.

Professional Pride. Goodman took to drumming as a Boy Scout in Brooklyn (he thinks "Americans have special imagination and aptitude for drumming"). When he was in high school, he heard a concert by the Philharmonic, and was so fascinated by the timpani that he dashed backstage and asked to become the timpanist's pupil. Six years later his teacher retired, leaving 20-year-old Saul in charge of the percussion section.

With him in the section these days are three or four other regulars (depending on the music to be played), who operate everything from bass drum to bird whistles. Goodman plays on kettles he made himself in his Yonkers shop. Next to his pride in producing a perfectly sustained tone and his ability to tune his instruments to perfect pitch while the orchestra is playing, is his pride in his patented devices for simplified timpani tuning. He has sold kettledrums at $600 a pair to the major U.S. orchestras and to some foreign ones.

"The Plaster Fell." Happy as he is with his art, Goodman thinks the timpanist's skill is not sufficiently understood. He doubts whether even conductors--since few have ever been timpanists themselves --can thoroughly appreciate the subtleties of a kettledrummer's tone and pitch. But only the deaf can miss it when the percussion comes in wrong.

That happened to Goodman four years ago, when the Philharmonic, playing under Leopold Stokowski in Chicago, swung into Arcady Dubensky's energetic Fugue for Eighteen Violins. The trouble was that the whole percussion section, which had no part in the violin piece, began playing the next piece on its music racks--Khacha-turian's Symphony No. 2--which opens with a crashing, jangling blast. "We raised the roof," says Goodman. "The plaster fell." Stokowski allowed them to hammer away happily for eight whole bars before they skidded to a stop. It has never happened again.

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